Archive for November, 2009

First fully automated restaurant

Always getting bad services from the restaurant you visited. In the future when you visit restaurant like this one in Germany, no one will be serving you. Place your orders using the touch panel and then insert the chip card that is given to you. Your order is now recorded and send to the kitchen. The food that you order for will be prepare by a chef who will later place the food on a rail and it will be automatically send to you. While waiting for the food you can continue to use the touch panel to surf the restaurant history or surf the internet.

What you can do with floppy disks?

Floppy disk laptop desk

This laptop stand is make up of 82 floppy disks. To build this take this guy a lot of time and planning. You can go to his blog for tutorial on how to build it.

Floppy laptop bag

Another creative design from the same guy, this time round he use floppy disk and make into a laptop bag. Catch the video below to see how he actually make it. Seen to be quite simple.

SanDisk Cruzer Micro 8 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive

via TechEBlog

uTorrent 2.0 To Elimininate The Need For ISP Throttling

If according to what this site have say is true then we will be going to experience high download speed soon and without slowing down our online game and web browsing. I have extracted part of the article from his site.

utorrent 2.0

BitTorrent lnc is about to launch a completely improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol that will benefit both users and ISPs. uTorrent 2.0, which is currently being tested by thousands of people, will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle or stop BitTorrent traffic, and will optimize the download experience for its users.

This is where uTP comes in. uTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be network friendly. The current implementation often causes interference with other applications, which is the main reason why ISPs try to slow it down, or even stop it altogether. uTP aims to solve this problem.

With uTP, uTorrent (and the Mainline client) will become network aware by throttling itself if congestion in the network is detected. This will have a huge impact on ISP networks according to Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management. “If uTP is successful it should result in a multi-billion dollar windfall in terms of savings for ISPs,” Morris told TorrentFreak

This means that the new uTorrent will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic in their networks. Of course, uTorrent users will also be affected by the new protocol. When needed, uTorrent will decrease the upload or download speed to avoid congestion.

According to Morris it’s mainly the upload speed that will be affected. “The throttling that matters most is actually not so much the download but rather the upload – as bandwidth is normally much lower UP than DOWN, the up-link will almost always get congested before the down-link does,” he explained.

“uTP measures the time a packet takes to get sent from peer A to peer B, so in theory uTP will detect congestion anywhere on that path, although in practice the congestion most often happens somewhere on the first-mile uplink connection.”

So does this mean that the new uTorrent will result in slower download times? Not necessarily. Since there is less congestion, uTorrent users will experience no slowdowns in web-browsing, and ideally less congestion and a more efficient use of the network may result in faster download speeds. uTP is currently being tested in uTorrent v2.0 beta and thus far none of the testers have reported any significant problems.

“There are already a couple of hundred thousand people using our v2.0 beta client, and things seem to be progressing very nicely. Our v2.0 client will initiate outgoing uTP connections by default whenever it can. Previous versions of our clients will accept incoming uTP connections – they just won’t initiate them,” Morris said.

“We’re excited that this creates a better experience for millions of consumers, and it also potentially has a massive impact on ISPs – greatly reducing (even eliminating) any justification to manage or shape BitTorrent traffic and allowing ISP networks to handle more BitTorrent traffic, without resulting congestion forcing capital network upgrades ahead of schedule or the ‘need’ to invest in DPI or other traffic shaping gear.”

It is hard to tell if uTP really is BitTorrent’s savior, but if it lives up to the expectations it will be beneficial to both users and ISPs. The specs for uTP will eventually be open so other clients will have the opportunity to implement it too. However, since uTorrent and the Mainline client together are used by two thirds of all BitTorrent users, the effects should be immediately noticeable to both those users and ISPs.

via torrentfreak